Former Nashville Symphony Orchestra music advisor Leonard Slatkin returns for a series of concerts in mid-March. The centerpiece of the performances is John Corigliano’s “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin,” a piece inspired by his Academy Award-winning score for the 1999 film tracing the history of a distinctively colored violin. Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä will perform the solo.

Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music will screen the film Tuesday, February 26, in Ingram Hall, followed by a discussion introduced by Nashville Symphony concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, who’s also on the Blair faculty.

The symphony’s program, which also includes Emmanuel Chabrier’s “España” and Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” will be presented 7 p.m. March 14, and 8 p.m. March 15-16 at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

While this marks a return to Nashville for Slatkin, it’ll be Vähälä’s first time performing in Nashville. Iwasaki, in particular, is looking forward to welcoming her, having worked with her during his tenure at the Oregon Symphony in Portland.

In fact, soon after Iwasaki’s arrival here, he brought up Vähälä’s name during a casual conversation with music director Giancarlo Guerrero.

“I’m really looking forward to working with her again, I think she’s a wonderful violinist,” Iwasaki said by phone. “She’s just a beautiful player and a very musical musician; her musicianship is very natural.”

The piece Vähälä is playing is relatively new and thus not an established part of the repertoire, but it has become a signature piece for her.

She remembers being taken by the music in the film, which she described as being filled with longing. She also found the story of the violin to be compelling.

“One always would love to know where the violin was all these centuries and who played it, but unfortunately I don’t know my violin’s history,” Vähälä said. She plays a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini from 1780.

Vähälä first became aware of the “Red Violin” concerto in 2003 when she met Corigliano while performing Brahms with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Corigliano’s second symphony was also on the program and after hearing her play, he told Vähälä about the concerto he’d just composed.

“I was really excited and just had to get my hands on this concerto,” Vähälä said by phone from Karlsruhe, Germany, where she teaches at the Hochschule für Musik. She didn’t have to wait long because Corigliano soon sent her a tape of Joshua Bell’s premiere performance of the piece.

By the time Bell’s three-year exclusive on the concerto had expired, Vähälä already had performances lined up. She performed it for the first time in fall 2006 and has played it almost every season since. Her recording of the piece with Finnish orchestra Sinfonia Lahti will be released in August.

Corigliano first revisited his “Red Violin” score with a chaconne, or series of slow variations, that became the first movement of the concerto.

“The scherzo (a lighter, playful movement) is very contemporary. But then in other parts of the concerto, there are a lot of beautiful melodies that you can really sing with the violin,” Vähälä said. The piece also includes “a lot of virtuosic stuff and very exciting, very rhythmic music,” she added.

She said Corigliano only had a few things to tell her when he heard her perform the work. “There was a feeling of trust and he gave a lot of space to do my own thing,” she said.